Today was our presentation on our “Ocotillo” project titled Maricopa’s Ocotillo Evolves Again: 18 Years of Faculty Led Instructional Technology Initiatives: Since 1987, Ocotillo has been a faculty led initiative to promote the effective use of instructional technology. Like its desert plant metaphor, Ocotillo has evolved again into four new action groups, leading a range […]
I’ve finally caught up with my other colleagues in getting into relaxed, holiday, not-at-the-office for a while mode. One of the nice side perks of working in education is getting their holiday schedule, so I am away from the building until January 3, hibernating up in our comfy cabin in Strawberry, in frequently sipping the […]
cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine UPDATE Mar 18, 2014: Now with videos! Last Friday was an extra special day to visit friends and colleagues at the Maricopa Community Colleges- it was the second annual TechTalks event hosted at Scottsdale Community College. Last year, they changed the format of […]
I sit brain dead in a plane heading west, home, after a New England road tour with stops at Baruch College in Manhattan, Penn State University, Middlebury Vermont, and wrapping yesterday in Salem, Massachusetts. The stop at Salem was an invited session for their sixth Future is Now conference a semester end gathering for faculty […]
Our NMC 2004 Small Pieces session intended to make a case for creating effective net-based collaboration using a discrete set of free tools, not so tightly controlled. This was fine, fun, and (frilly), but I wanted to describe here how we are trying to implement this for some real work.
We are headed into the 18th year of a faculty-led initiative for instructional technology at Maricopa called “Ocotillo” (see some history and the details on the metaphor). Dealing with technology, this almost organic organization evolves and re-invents itself, and just this past year, we “flipped” over a structure from representing college interests to topical ones (more details than anyone wants).
Anyhow, bottom line, this coming academic year, we will have four “action groups” each led by a pair of faculty, who will research, promote, prod, disseminate, dissect, and hopefully engage people in the areas of:
Being a large, decentralized college system in an ever sprawling metropolis, I am vigorously promoting using more technology to share, communicate, and conduct this work, and get us out of the “F2F meeting/workshop” mode. So while ramping up for our Small Pieces presentation, I was also cobbling together a system of weblogs, wikis, and discussion boards, tied together with RSS, tape, and bailing wire, and hoping we can spring this effectively on our system this year.
In what will become a long rambling post, I will describe how this all works together. Brian has already pointed out that this is actually not loosely joined but rather “tight” (a compliment, I hope). And as an off kilter kind of success, before even sharing the URL, this morning already got a drug product spam (MTBlacklist now engaged)…
